Readers who rock and bi-polar editors

Yes, as if you didn’t already know it, you’re a great bunch. Emails and comments, all advising and supporting me in my dilemma, have made the past few days a real joy. Perhaps it’s the isolation of writing for a living that makes such (relatively) small problems loom so large, but you certainly helped me restore my perspective. I’m taking three routes through the problem:

1 – writing to the accounts department of the publication with a registered letter so they can’t say they didn’t get it, asking for them to pay me
2 – asking their major funder what they think I should do. I suspect the funder will be very surprised to discover this has happened
3 – preparing my case for a Money Claim Online, which is the updated version of going to the Small Claims Court (it costs £30, which would make a hole in my fee, but it’s better than getting nothing) and is the last resort in cases like this.

And once all that is done, I shall contact Writer’s Weekly with my experience so that the information can be shared with all the writers who subscribe – if you don’t get their newsletter, it’s really worth it, just for the whispers and warnings, of which my sad story is just one.

Now, bi-polar editors – one email asked if I’d ever had this experience ‘when you see a submission call and you send something and the editor asks for revisions and you got on really well, first name terms and all that, and then a few weeks later when you send the revisions, it’s back to Mr. X and the cold shoulder and you wonder what you did wrong …’

I have had it, and I fear I’ve probably done it myself, and the explanation is very simple. At the beginning of a submission call, you get two types of submission trickling in:
1. excellent subs that just happen to be lying around when the writer reads your call and that match your needs more or less exactly
2. rubbish, written in green ink on graph paper.

Because there is only a trickle at this point, editors can engage with the writers in the first group and have the luxury of time to build relationships.

Fast forward two months – now the trickle is a torrent and the submissions are much more variable – there are many more borderline ones that need proper reading and an informed decision and other pressures are coming to bear; similar stories have to be compared to each other so that the publication is not to ‘samey’, the managing editor’s favourite writers suddenly have to be fast-tracked and your fellow editor drops out, leaving you with double the work. The stories you asked writers to revise turn up and by this point you have only the vaguest memory of what you asked for and why … and you’ve completely forgotten that you were on the way to becoming buddies! It’s all you can do to send back an acknowledgement, and it never occurs to you that your one line response may strike confusion and unhappiness into the heart of the poor writer with whom you were once getting on so well …

Ethical Dilemma

Advise me, dear readers. You may remember that way back in December I posted about a journal that hadn’t paid me, despite signing a contract with me, and that I received a snippy email from the journal’s editor when I queried the non-payment, telling me that she had more important things to worry about and I would get my money on 4 January.

I didn’t get my money.

I emailed her again on 18 January.

There has been a complete silence.

The journal is still publishing.

Now, should I name and shame and perhaps protect other writers from the same fate? Or should I say nothing if I can’t say anything nice and move on, accepting that once in a while we all get burned?

I really don’t know what to do.

Writing About Sex

(taught by me!)

Be it a work of erotic literature, or a scene in a murder mystery, writing about sex can be fraught with fear and inhibitions. Kay Sexton presents an intensive five session evening course on how to master the genres - from the simply sensual to the downright dirty!

Kay Sexton's fiction has been chosen for over twenty anthologies. She was a finalist in the 2007 University of Hertford-shire Writing Award and runner-up in the 2004 Guardian short fiction contest judged by Dave Eggers. She writes and edits erotic fiction for a number of publications.

Thursdays 28 Feb, 6, 13 & 27 March and 3 April 2008, 18.30 - 21.00

Members of New Writing South £85 - non-members £125 (former students have earned back their course fees on the sale of a single story written during the course!)

This is not a course for the easily shocked or for writing novices - and applicants need to apply in writing to Kay Sexton, c/o New Writing South, 9 Jew Street, Brighton BN1 1UT or kay@charybdis.freeserve.co.uk

Where do you write?

As regular readers will know, I have a horror of ritualisation. The habits and processes that writers use to gear themselves up to write must be useful, not damaging, and one of the most damaging I know of is the need to be in a certain place, at a certain time, with certain accessories, before you can write.

Ritualisation itself is not bad, in fact it’s a positive process, like the creative visualisation that dancers and athletes use to prepare for intense performances. If you can see yourself writing strongly and confidently in your mind’s eye, then you are more likely to sit down and write with fluency and aplomb. If, on the other hand, you see yourself having to make a cup of coffee, drink half of it, read the leader in the Telegraph, check your emails and open the post before you can write, then anything that throws that process out of joint will throw your writing out of the window. No coffee? No writing. Email programme crashes? No writing. And so on.

So I write in bed for half an hour every morning when I wake up. I write on the bus. I write in cafes. I write in hotels and on trains and, especially, in airports. I do write at my desk for hours every day, but all those other places are encompassed in my writing ritual too. I write in Moleskins, I write in shorthand pads, I have even been known to write on the back of Pizza Express order pads and a story that won me $250 saw the light of day on the inner front cover of a cheap crossword book in Paradise Park amusement centre—it was the only paper to hand and the pen I used was lent to me by the bingo caller!

And this is The End of the Lanes, possibly the best hot chocolate shop in the UK, and that’s my notebook, containing the first draft of a(nother) radio play. Write anywhere? Yes. But write better when I’m drinking hot chocolate, waiting for a friend, and gazing out at Brighton’s wonderfully eccentric population. Always!

What a magazine editor owes a writer

A fascinating debate has begun over at Kelly J Spitzer’s blog. If you’re one of the many writers who doubles as an editor, even ‘trebles’ as editor and copy-editor, as I do, then you do get to see this problem from a wide range of perspectives. One of the most interesting things, to me, is that there’s a huge difference in genres when you meet editors talking about rejection letters. The literary fiction world is much more ‘suck it up and move on’ than the science fiction world, which is generally more collegiate and supportive (not in terms of individuals being nicer, don’t get me wrong, but in terms of having message boards and forums where writers foregather) and the poetry world can be very nasty indeed when it comes to critique from editors.

If only there was a way to show the average (or even above average) writer just how many stories arrive on a editor’s desk and cannot be distinguished one from another. The number of dead dog, college break up and ‘it turns out they were married all along’ type stories one has to read is downright morbid, and finding fresh reasons to reject them can test the ingenuity of the editor more than the writer ever tested theirs in the construction of their narrative!

A world unlike any other

That’s the world of the science fiction writer. And after a long silence, in which I’d actually said goodbye to two of my acceptances for last year, it’s a world that’s come to life again, as two anthologies that stalled seem to be back on the cards for me. Well, for Ren, anyway.

The point about writing genre fiction is that you have to love the genre with all your heart and your twisted little soul—it isn’t possible to do half-hearted sci-fi or horror or slipstream or cyberpunk or whatever. You have to swim in that particular ocean with all the joyous abandon of a happy dolphin or you’re wasting your time. Ren Holton does, fortunately for me. In fact Ren in his/her leather coat is never happier than when curled up with a coffee and a large tome of science fiction. S/he just reviewed James Sallis’s excellent short story collection Time’s Hammers for The Small Press Review (UK) and fell in love all over again with that particular writer’s style. I hate the s/he bit you know, but when I picked a pen-name for sci-fi it was deliberately genderless and as Ren Holton has been described as male in one set of end notes and as female in another anthology's preface, I feel properly birfucated about my own identity.

Now I’m going to stick my neck out a bit and say that while erotica editors are the nicest people I’ve ever met, and literary fiction editors are the most erudite, I have the closest relationships with science fiction editors. To a man and woman (and all other genders/organisms, let’s not be exclusive here, we are talking alternate worlds, after all) they are just the best folk to email back and forth with. I love ‘em! And not just because they accept my work (although that’s generally a good start to a relationship) but because they nearly always go the extra mile for a writer, giving concrete examples of HOW they want stuff submitted, WHERE a story fell down for them, WHY they are suggesting changes to a piece etc. Particular kudos here to Lane Adamson over at Permuted Press who is taking subs for Robots Beyond and who is proving to be a treasure (and no, he hasn’t accepted anything of mine … yet). If you have a story that meets his needs, read the instructions carefully, fulfil them, and send it in—maybe we’ll anthologise together?

What stops you writing?

If you’d asked me at the end of last year, I’d have said ‘nothing’. Rather smugly in fact. I would have pointed to the times my computer fritzed out, my internet connection disappeared, I found myself in foreign places with nothing but scrap paper and pencil ends, and still wrote.

How are the mighty fallen.

I have discovered that one thing stops me writing. Unexpected success.

Since 1 January, I’ve had four acceptances – one a solicitation even - and it’s thrown me for a loop. My words just stopped dead. It’s been very odd. And it’s not as if I’m not used to a reasonable level of success, but it seems the unexpectedness of it sent all my own neuroses into a happy little spin, in which they sang ‘Oh, that’s as good as it gets, you’ll never have a week like this again’ out loud in my head until I couldn’t write.

Well, it’s probably true. A week in which one receives four acceptances must surely be rarer than a hen’s tooth. So why did I go into misery mode, rather than celebrating this rare event? Because of that voice that most writers hear, at some time, the voice that says ‘See, you’ve had the best of it. It’s all downhill from now. You’ll never write/perform/edit that well again. You’ll never get four acceptances in a week again …’ And so on, until the writer curls up in a ball and watches TV repeats until he or she dribbles.

So a few words appeared today. And I’ve blogged. And tomorrow it’s back to the routine, whether or not I get an acceptance, whether or not I get a rejection, whether or not the voice turns up in my head to tell me the worst case scenario - I am going to write.

Habits - good and bad, and how to make them work for you as a writer

Months ago I read Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer, and took note of her suggestion that a writer should write for half an hour first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, brushing their teeth or having their morning coffee, cigarette, meusli or whatever else would start their day in an acceptable fashion.

It sounded frankly impossible. But my partner starts work at seven, so he leaves home around six-thirty, and in the spirit of enquiry I asked him to wake me every morning. I put a shorthand pad and pen by the side of the bed, and started the experiment.

I did make one change to Brande's suggestion. I wrote the title of the story I wanted to work on at the top of the first fresh page in the pad before I went to sleep. Now, in the morning, I start work immediately, (without brushing my teeth either, a thing I would have considered impossible a year ago!) and I write for thirty minutes.

It works.

It took six months to establish the habit. At first I would write nothing, or write drivel, or drift into making lists for the day ahead. Sometimes I would write for half an hour and find all I'd done was recapitulate some part of the story already written. Persisting became a real chore.

Somewhere around the fifth month I discovered that I could do this thing I'd thought impossible - I could write for thirty minutes, on a subject I'd decided the night before, and produce coherent text. It was as if my subconscious suddenly realised that it was meant to be in partnership with my conscious mind, just for that half hour, and delivered the narrative goods as a kind of waking dream.

During the holidays, of course, I don't get woken in time for my half hour's writing before the day starts and my productivity drops by about 15%. It's not a huge amount, but it's enough to show me just how valuable this habit has become - breaking the habit, in other words, reinforces how important it is to my writing life. I look forward to tomorrow, when he's back at work and I shall be returning to Brande's excellent system.

So if you have writing habits, whether good or bad, remember that it takes most people around six months to establish new ones, and remember to break your habits from time to time, to find out whether they really are contributing to your writing output.